We're with you.

"Sadness."

dead starling
Originally uploaded by paul van eik.

"Sadness" is a "hot tag" on Flickr today, along with tags like "londonbombblast," "bombings," "aftermath," and "terrorism." But not every photo tagged "sadness" depicts the London bombings. This picture simply shows a little boy (in the Netherlands) who is sad that the starling he tried to save has died. The boy's pure outrage at death touched me.

"Eve-teasing."

I had never seen that expression -- used in India, for sexual harassment -- until I read this article:

DESPITE a high rate of literacy, it has been observed that local girls and women hesitate to approach the police when it comes to eve-teasing. Even now when someone teases them, they take it as a stigma and find it best to avoid the situation.

Newsline spoke to different sections of people on this issue. Shivali Sharma, a post-graduate student, says, ‘‘Have you heard the case, in which a police constable raped a girl in Mumbai. After hearing such cases, how can a girl even think of approaching the police,’’ she said.

Nidhi Tuli, who has recently done a diploma in export management, says, ‘‘Since childhood, we have been taught to avoid such persons and situations, so I never thought of approaching the police. I don’t even tell report an incident of eve-teasing to my parents and try to ‘solve’ the problem myself.’’

Geetanjali Chhabra, an undergraduate at Khalsa College, says, ‘‘I know there are numerous laws to check eve-teasing but if you approach the police even they start embarrassing you’’.

IN THE COMMENTS: Some discussion of dealing with the police in India leads me to share this story (which has nothing to do with India):

One of the downsides to travel is the strange police ways of another country -- if you should happen to need to encounter them. I got robbed in Rome and, believe me, the police were ridiculous. The criminals -- children who prey on travelers in the train station -- were caught and I had to sit around with them in the office. The kids cried (crocodile tears) and spoke with the cops in Italian. I got bits of it translated. In the end, the cops simply let the kids go and explained to me "They're children." Presumably the police got their cut, because at one point a cop came in with a stack of wallets, including mine. So I did get my wallet back, minus the cash.

Londoners.

I had the satellite radio tuned to BBC all day today, and I heard a lot of interviews with persons on the street in London. They were being asked: do you think you'll be able to get home? how do today's attacks make you feel? and will you come in to work tomorrow? Person after person displayed exactly the same attitude: an almost cheerful faith in the ability to get home somehow, crisp but not emotive anger about the attacks, and an uncomplicated intention to come back to work tomorrow just as they would any other day. No sobbing or even mild whining. No despair whatsoever. Inspiring!

MORE: Tony Blair exemplifies this attitude:

"It is a very sad day for the British people but we will hold true to the British way of life.

"It is through terrorism that the people who have committed this terrible act express their values and it is right at this moment that we demonstrate ours."

Well said.

STILL MORE: Slate gathers some London attitude, blogger-style. From the freely expressive, feisty Nosemonkey:

"I tell you what, if this is an 'Islamic' terrorist attack, they're doing a piss-poor job. The pubs are all packed out, people sipping their pints happily, all a tad pissed off, but basically fine with it," he noted at 2:05 p.m. "Nice one, Al Quaeda - you profess to be from a teetotal religion, and you've given the pub trade a massive mid-week boost. … Other than causing the grief of too many innocent people, these cunts will have achieved precisely fuck all. We shall not be moved."

And scroll down to the pictures at 23:20:

Nearly time for bed. All I ask is that we don't forget the others who have died today, from whom those bastard terrorists managed to distract our attention.

Reporter Miller goes to jail; judge mouths bad metaphor.

I respect civil disobedience, defying the law for a cause. Part of it is accepting the consequences, as Judith Miller is doing. It's a very powerful image, a person going willingly to jail for a principle deeply believed in. It can work to produce a change in the law.

"I have a person in front of me," Judge Hogan said, "who is defying the law."...

Ms. Miller, who conducted interviews but never wrote an article about the C.I.A. operative, joins a line of journalists who have accepted jail time rather than betray their sources' confidences. That tradition, according to Judge Hogan, does not deserve respect.

"That's the child saying: 'I'm still going to take that chocolate chip cookie and eat it. I don't care,'" the judge said.

There being no federal journalist's privilege, the judge had to punish Miller, but he didn't have to say that. His effort to strip all dignity from her as she made her grand gesture backfired and made him look small.

London terrorist attack.

Six explosions. Two dead. Are any of my readers there? If so, tell us what you can in the comments.

UPDATE: From the BBC:

An Islamist website has posted a statement - purportedly from al-Qaeda - claiming it was behind the attacks.

In search of offensive religious jokes.

BBC reports:

Ship of Fools, an online magazine which describes itself as the "Private Eye of the Christian world", is looking for the funniest, and most offensive, Christian jokes.

In the face of legislation [in Britain] it fears will limit what people can joke about in a religious context - a claim strongly rejected by ministers - it wants to provoke a debate about what is humorous and what is offensive.

"It's vital we have such criticism at the heart of our way of life and religion," says co-editor Stephen Goddard, who thinks an interactive debate is healthy for Christianity.

"But no-one knows quite where humour goes into offence, because one man's joke is another man's offensive comment. We're trying to find the theology of humour - how to understand humour from a Christian perspective, and we're giving people the chance to judge their own views by other people's."

But why is religion so often a source of comedy? Mr Goddard says it because there's a black humour to the Bible stories.

"The prophets did crazy things to draw the attention of people to repentance and a return to godly ways, like dragging dogs through the streets or sitting on a pillar for 40 years. Religion tends to draw certain extreme people, which can be very good material for humour."

Note the limitation of the search: Christians are searching for offensive jokes about Christianity. Making someone else's religion into a joke is another matter. Not that I think it should be against the law.

(Please don't be offensive in the comments!)

Is there ever a dull moment in the Life of Althouse?

Yes. Yes, there is. Like today, when I had nothing at all to pass the time, not even a scrap of paper to read, and I took this picture:



Actually, that picture reminds me that I kind of like this TV show.

"Women Suffer More than Men."

That's what it says here:

New research has found that women report more pain throughout their lifetime. Compared to men, women feel pain in more areas of their body and for longer durations.

"The bottom line seems to be that women are suffering more than men," said Ed Keogh, a psychologist from the Pain Management Unit at the University of Bath.

In one study, Keogh and his collaborators interviewed patients in a pain management program. Although the program reduced chronic pain for all the subjects, in follow up exams the women in the group reported pain levels as high as before the treatment -- whereas the improvements in the male group were longer lasting.

In another set of experiments, volunteers were asked to put their arms in an ice water bath. Men were found to have higher pain thresholds (the point where they began to feel pain), as well as higher pain tolerances (the point where the pain became too much)....

"Social and psychological factors cannot be ignored," Keogh said. "We have found that women will focus on the emotional response to stress."

In contrast, men typically think only of the sensation itself, which may explain their higher thresholds and tolerances.

"Women who concentrate on the emotional aspects of their pain may actually experience more pain as a result, possibly because the emotions associated with pain are negative," Keogh said.

This is interesting, because I'd always heard that women have more endurance for pain. That notion may just have formed from witnessing childbirth. Men have been looking on for millennia and thinking, I couldn't do that.

I can't help observing, though, that this study is flawed, because they relied on the subject describing his or her own pain, and men are more likely -- I would think -- to put on a stoical front. Maybe women seem to have more endurance for pain because they are more willing to call a feeling pain or to admit they have pain.

But if it's true and we women do experience heightened physical sensation because of a tendency to merge physical stimuli with emotion, then we ought to have more pleasure too. As Tiresias reported.

"I got rid of them when I finally had some authority."

Chefs against green peppers:

Brian Bistrong of the Harrison doesn't like the way green pepper lingers. "If you eat one, you're going to taste it the rest of the meal," Mr. Bistrong said. "I got rid of them when I finally had some authority. Now that I'm the boss, I can not have them."

Dan Barber, who won't let green peppers into the kitchens of either Blue Hill Restaurant in Manhattan or Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., called the problems with the vegetable "multitiered."

"First, I don't like the flavor," he said. "And I've learned more about them. They're an immature pepper. You're eating a vegetable before it's supposed to be picked."

Tasha Garcia, one of the chefs of Little Giant, recoils when she tastes anything that reminds her of it. "We had a staff tasting and with this one cabernet franc it was like, oh, green peppers," Miss Garcia said. She added that she was overwhelmed by the association. "I hated the wine, hated it, hated it," she said. "Now I'm not a big cabernet franc fan."

The Laura factor.

Why is Bush homing in on Alberto Gonzales for the Supreme Court appointment, despite all the noisemaking by social conservatives who worry that he might not be pro-life? Maybe it's the Laura factor. Don't you think Laura Bush is telling him that he can't put someone on the Court who will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade? Appointing Gonzales is so perfect: he can pick his dear friend, he can have the distinction and the political advantage of appointing the first Hispanic Justice, he can deflect criticism from Democrats (who have to realize that Gonzales is the most liberal possible choice Bush can make) and from Republicans (who just don't have enough information to pin Gonzales down as pro-abortion), and he can do what his wife is (probably) telling him that he simply must do.

Put the Laura factor into the equation and the answer is obvious: Bush will pick Gonzales.

Found while Googling to see if anyone else was saying that: "Who influences George W. Bush?" by Howard Fineman. This is the relevant passage:

Bush has been shaped and surrounded by strong women. As he himself has said, he has had a series of them to “mother-hen me.” They include Barbara Bush, Laura Bush, Karen Hughes, Condoleeza Rice and Harriet Miers, now the White House counsel but for many years before that, his personal lawyer. (Give his daughters a few more years to mature, and they will perform the same function; they already serve as jovially merciless style critics.)

What does this have to do with the Supreme Court? Plenty: as far as I know, none of these women is “pro-life” in the strict sense – certainly Barbara and Laura Bush are not. The president has said that the country is not ready to see the overturn of Roe V. Wade. Maybe what he meant was: My Mother Hens aren’t ready. Would he want to defy them with his Supreme Court choice now?

And since Bush is replacing a woman on the Court, there is all the more reason to pay attention to what the women in his life are saying to him. And, unlike Finemen, I think those daughters are telling him plenty.

My declining NYT habit.

I've just been catching up on the email and checking the blogs. I see Richard is doing some blogger meme that involves listing your five favorite things in six categories -- the five senses plus "kinetic sensation." I'm not one to take the trouble to try to come up with so many items. I mean -- what? -- for smell there's Play-Doh... but then what?

And then there's the creativity-crushing feeling of obligation to recognize loved ones: the smell of my wife, the taste of my wife, the sight of my wife, the sound of my wife, the touch of my wife, the kinetic sensation of my wife. Really, to make this meme any good, there ought to be a ban on mentioning family members.

Anyway, for sight, the one that springs immediately to my mind is: the sight of the New York Times on my front walk in the morning. [Make mental note to watch "My Dinner with Andre" again soon.]

For decades, I have begun each day at home picking up that blue bag, spreading the paper out on the dining table, and -- unless I'm rushing off to some oddly early commitment -- having my morning coffee while paging through the Times, reading whatever interests me (and doing the crossword). In the last year and a half, I've combined this habit with blogging. I've usually gotten the day's blogging going by commenting on two or three things in the NYT that have caught my eye.

But lately, I've gotten absorbed in reading things on my laptop, and the NYT has sat there longer and longer without my opening it. Today, I'm shocked to see that it's after 5 in the afternoon and I still haven't read more than a front-page headline. I'm not tired of it. I've been meaning to get to it all day. I'm just losing the habit.

The blogging habit -- which used to be merged with reading the paper Times -- has taken over the habit-space in my day.

UPDATE: Let me alert you to the existence in the comments section at the link of bickering between me and my ex-husband. It's rich, like good black soil.

Covering the unknown Supreme Court nominee.

Hmmm... just checking the Site Meter referrals and seeing that I'm getting traffic from the Washington Post. It's this article (on page 2) -- Howard Kurtz, writing about the Supreme Court appointment -- or, really, the strangeness of all the media coverage of the appointment in this period before anyone's been selected. Kurtz quotes this post of mine. And he collects lots of other commentary -- quite interesting -- about the unknown nominee and the Senate response to him/her.

I notice Kurtz refers to me only as "Ann Althouse," not "blogger Ann Althouse" or "law professor Ann Althouse" or "blogging law professor Ann Althouse" or "law professing blogger Ann Althouse." Not sure whether that makes me feel famous or obscure.

When is ideology an "extraordinary circumstance" within the meaning of the filibuster compromise?

I'm giving the prize to Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La.) -- one of the fourteen compromisers -- who took this postion:

"A nominee's political ideology is only relevant if it has been shown to cloud their interpretation of the law. . . . A pattern of irresponsible judgment, where decisions are based on ideology rather than the law, could potentially be 'extraordinary.' "

Change "could potentially be" to "is" and you've nailed it.

Of course, we'll still have to argue over what counts as "clouded" and "irresponsible," and I'm going to withdraw my approval if it turns out to be just the view that the decisions produced by principled originalism or textualism are wrong. Tell me, Senator Landrieu: If you applied this standard to Justice Scalia or Thomas, would they deserve a filibuster? The answer should be no.

How good is circumcision?

This good.

Toning up the rhetoric, paying attention.

Hey, Sarah Vowell is the new guest columnist at the NYT. I love her hilarious, never-padded writing. I'm immensely enjoying the audio version of her current book "Assassination Vacation." So it's great to see her here.

A taste:

Seeing [Pat] Robertson in that commercial with Bono - and Bono's hair - is a little like listening to Paul Anka's new recording of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." At first, it's jarring to hear the guy who wrote "Puppy Love" for Donny Osmond sing Kurt Cobain's lyrics: "a mosquito, my libido." But listen hard and you can hear what Anka hears. He doesn't hear the ranting of weirdos. He hears the poetry, the architecture of a justifiably standard song like "Autumn in New York," like "Fly Me to the Moon."

See how there's something to see in every phrase? I love that!

Anyway, tucked away in this piece that's mostly about aid to Africa, she has this on topic of replacing Sandra Day O'Connor:

On Monday, anticipating an epic dust-up regarding his new nominee for the Supreme Court, President Bush said he hoped that special-interest groups on both sides would "tone down the heated rhetoric." They shouldn't, though.

This is about the lifetime appointment of a person who will be making life and death decisions for millions of people for decades to come, not about some petty time waster like - come on, again? - flag burning. It's so important that we should agree to melt together on the slopes of a Kilauea of issue-ad spew.

Here's the front-page NYT story about the request to tone down the rhetoric on the Supreme Court appointment. I disapprove of exaggerated rhetoric myself, much as I enjoy selecting the juiciest nuggets of it for blogging purposes. But I do think it's right to argue about who belongs on the Court. It's terribly good for us to engage with this, especially to learn to detect when we are being played and to grasp what matters and what really doesn't. Vowell is correct to flag flag-burning as one of the unimportant issues that are used to manipulate ordinary people while the powerful jockey to get the things they really care about.

This is an excellent time for everybody to pay attention. The President would like you to calm down, sit back, and believe that he's carefully studying all the credentials and will decide whom to nominate based on the highest of principles, at which point you're supposed to boo anyone would would obstruct the slick path to confirmation. But you shouldn't do that.

UPDATE: I note that the Times let Vowell make a huge gaffe. Paul Anka did not write "Puppy Love" for Donny Osmond. Paul Anka was himself a teen idol, circa 1959, and "Puppy Love" was one of his many hits. Donny Osmond simply did a cover version, years later.

"There were very few women in law school."

So said Nina Totenberg on "Meet the Press" last Sunday. She was talking about 1981, the year Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court. A lot of people have gone soft in the head over the O'Connor retirement. Can we please get a grip?

I graduated from law school in 1981. Law School was full of women then. The editor-in-chief of the Law Review was a woman both years I was on. The top three students in the class were women. It wasn't like: Wow, there's a woman on the Supreme Court -- now, I see that women can go into the field of law!

I remember in 1981 saying to one of my many women lawprofs that I was interested in going into law teaching. One of the things she told me was that it used to help to be a woman, because law schools needed to increase the number of women on their faculties, but unfortunately I'd already missed that boat. That was too cynical, of course, but my point is that it was something you could say with a straight face in 1981, so let's not pretend O'Connor was a lone pioneer.

Here's the whole Totenberg quote for reference:

[A]s the first woman--you know, young women today may not remember, but I was there and it was an incredibly moving moment when she was named to the court. And I covered the court back then and I was amazed at myself, at how emotionally caught up I was in it. At that point in the profession, there were almost no women judges. There were very few. There were almost no women lawyers. There were very few women in law school. Today, there are women all over the federal and state bench, lots of chief judges and state chief justices. The majority of law students in major American laws schools are women. So she essentially became the symbol, the opening of the doors, as she said to me in an interview last year. It sort of threw open the doors and the profession that was once an almost exclusively male club is now a totally integrated club.

This is, in fact, ridiculous.

"The only way to stop 'borking' as a political strategy is to defy and defeat it."

The Wall Street Journal makes the argument -- and makes it well -- that Bush should appoint a strong conservative to replace Justice O'Connor. In my view, these are especially strong points:

1. Bush ran for office saying he would choose someone like Justices Scalia and Thomas.

2. There has been a strong tendency in recent decades for moderate conservatives to move to a liberal position on the Court, so conservatives have already been deprived of their share of the sort of justices they favor and are quite reasonable to guard against this with a new appointment.

3. Re Gonzales: "as former White House counsel and now head of the Justice Department, [he] would have to recuse himself from most if not all of the war-on-terror cases." The threat of 4-4 decisions alone is reason to oppose him. (Experts on recusal: is this true?)

4. "Borking" is wrong and should be confronted.

Who am I? Why am I not here?

James Stockdale, Perot's running mate in 1992, has died. He employed an unforgettable, offbeat style in the Vice Presidential debate, which will live forever in Saturday Night Live reruns, where his impersonator, Phil Hartman, is also immortal.

So that's what it takes to get a Wonkette link!

See.

So, should I continue this new sexualizing-the-Supreme-Court thing?

UPDATE: I'd like to see Wonkette's email. Bloggers must write to her constantly seeking links, pitching posts whenever they've taken something political and sexualized it. I wonder if it make her sad sometimes.

Have you seen "War of the Worlds"?

Chris (my 22 year old son) just saw it and gives it the highest praise. Dialogue:

ME: Does it connect with political stuff -- the war on terror...?

CHRIS: Yes, because it's set in the present day, and at one point the little girl asks, "Are they terrorists?"

ME: So, is it left wing?

CHRIS: No.

ME: Is it right wing?

CHRIS: I don't think it's right wing, because the people who made it are probably liberals, but I think right wing people could really get into it. If you're really into the war on terrorism, you could probably get into it as symbolic of the war on terrorism, because it shows the American military trying to fight against the aliens, and it has a teenage son who wants to join the American military in the fight against the aliens.

ME: And he's a positive character?

CHRIS: Yeah, he's the main son... he's Tom Cruise's son.

ME (noticeably typing): Is there anything else you'd like to say?

CHRIS: It's a real experience to watch the movie.

ME: That's what you want to say "it's a real experience to watch the movie"?

CHRIS: Yeah. I saw it on the Ultra-Screen and I was sitting pretty close to the front, so it was like an IMAX.

Also, we discussed the negative Roger Ebert review, and I speculated that Ebert marked it down because he picked up a right wing vibe.

Okay, you Kelo haters.

Powerline's John Hinderaker writes, in The Weekly Standard, that Kelo is not so bad. (My Kelo-is-not-so-bad posts are here and here.)

Busted.

Literally.

M. Diddy says house arrest is "hideous."

M. Diddy being Martha Stewart's prison nickname.

Did you know I wrote "the creepiest sentence ever" about the Supreme Court?

It's in this post (and pointed out by one of the commenters). And I really did mean to put that image in your mind.

What if no one is bisexual?

Some researchers attached sensors to 101 penises and then showed the possessors of these penises either all-male or all-female porn movies. It was kind of a lie detector test, because the men had all professed to being heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. All the bisexuals, it seems, were lying -- or deluding themselves. Once you disregard the one-third of men who weren't aroused by any of it -- which, rightly or wrongly, the scientists do -- all the men were distinctly attracted either to males or to females. This contradicts the views of Freud (who thought bisexuality was the norm) and Kinsey (who thought there was a continuum from heterosexuality to homosexuality).

I think you can critique the study in various ways, but I'm also interested in how this finding -- if we were to confirm it as a solid fact and applicable to women as well as men -- would affect various arguments about gay rights. Let me posit that believing Kinsey was right about the continuum is currently causing many people to resist the social acceptance of homosexuality. They are hoping to influence people in the middle of the continuum to choose a heterosexual "lifestyle." But if no one really is in the middle, this attempt at influence is truly misguided. You may as well remove the obstacles to the individual's free choice of sexual orientation.

Trying to control what the next Justice will have to say.

Todd Purdum has this piece in the NYT about the way Supreme Court Justices have disappointed the Presidents who chose them. The classic quotes of the miffed Presidents are there: "I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that," etc.

And here's a quote from Chief Justice Rehnquist:

[T]he court "is an institution far more dominated by centrifugal forces, pushing towards individuality and independence, than it is by centripetal forces pulling for hierarchical ordering and institutional unity."

Funny, since the front page of yesterday's NYT had Linda Greenhouse talking about the way there is a strong centripetal force on the Court (which I agreed with). But Greenhouse's centripetal force metaphor referred to the Justices' tendency to move to the ideological center, while Rehnquist used that metaphor to mean adherence to the ideology the President perceived in the judge at the time of appointment. So there is no real disagreement here. The Justices acting independently -- affected by the Chief's "centrifugal force" -- are breaking away from the ideology they brought to the Court and, if they move to the center, this Rehnquistian "centifugal" move is the Greenhousian "centripetal" move.

Strange how we picture a person's ideology as a thing existing in space and subject to the principles of physics!

Do you ever look critically at the diagram of politics you've got stored in your head that you use all the time without thinking much about? How about that mental picture of the Court? It's pretty simplistic, isn't it?

I wish Presidents would choose judges who are deep and serious thinkers with enough dimension and substance that we wouldn't be able to form such a simple picture. I wish the opinions were written by people whose work I would be interested in reading if it had no grand authoritative power to it.

The struggle against disorder.

Locally, I'm caught up in an email discussion about the struggle to keep one's house in order. I wrote:

I could use a little motivation to keep my house in order. One reason I want to move to a smaller place is to have more order. I love order just enough to appreciate it after I've cleaned up and to think I should keep it that way and then to remember that feeling, later, when disorder has taken over.

And then this:

I'm thinking of ordering a dumpster, just to fill it up. A dumpster's worth of stuff removed from my house would really make me feel better.

The idea of a yard sale was raised. My response:

It's not worth dealing with strangers pawing through my things for a few hundred bucks. You have to sort through things and display them and be pleasant to everyone and face their cheapness. Horrible!

Comments?

Just a place in Paris.

~~~
Originally uploaded by John Cohen.

But, oh, I love the name!

(This is another one of John's pictures. How I would love to wander the streets of Paris and find amusing things like this to photo-blog!)

"Almost as if a constitutional centripetal force had been at work."

Linda Greenhouse sums up the Supreme Court's last term and concludes that the center has control:

The court's federalism revolution stalled, while the revival of property rights, which appeared to be taking off not long ago, crashed and burned on a riverbank in New London, Conn....

Justice Stephen G. Breyer displaced Justice O'Connor at the court's center of gravity, casting the fewest dissenting votes - 10, to Justice O'Connor's 11 - in the 74 cases that were decided with full opinions.

As the Rehnquist Court ended a 19th year and appeared poised, unexpectedly, to begin a 20th, it was almost as if a constitutional centripetal force had been at work in recent years, pulling the court back toward the middle in many areas of its docket, including federalism, affirmative action, religion and abortion. The result frustrated conservatives and raised the stakes for the appointment of Justice O'Connor's successor.

The court's six discrimination cases from this past term provide an example. Three were brought under the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection, and the others required an interpretation of three different federal statutes.

I think there really is "a constitutional centripetal force" that operates on the minds of the individuals that find themselves on the Court.

What does this say about whom Bush should pick to replace O'Connor? I think it will be hard for the newcomer to avoid the seductions of the center. The temptation to yield to the embrace of Stephen Breyer and Anthony Kennedy will be quite strong. But if Bush remains true to his campaign statements -- and why doesn't he owe that to his supporters? -- he will appoint a hardcore conservative who can resist the centripetal force. In so doing he will only increase the effect of the centripetal force on Justice Kennedy, transforming him -- as I said last Friday -- into a reliable liberal.

"A jet-black, pickle-shaped, icy dirt ball traveling at 6.3 miles per second."

That was Tempel 1 -- 83 million miles away. And we hit it with an impactor launched from Deep Impact.

At those speeds, impactor had to be in the right place at the right time to intercept the speeding snowball.

"It's a bullet trying to hit a second bullet with the third bullet," Rick Grammier, Deep Impact project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in June.

And Deep Impact filmed the brilliant explosion and sent the pictures home.



Amazing! Spectacular! Beautiful!

"Communities."

I love the format and idea of the "communities" part of Truth Laid Bear. And I'm very happy to be included in the nice "Academy" community. But it just doesn't update often enough. What is labeled "fresh bloggy goodness" is a day old right now. Sorry to complain about a site that is so wonderful overall, but a big part of blogging is speed.

Independence Day.

(I took this picture two years ago, and have been waiting to post it. In my family, this is known as my "most right wing photo" and jokes have been made along the lines of: "What if you put that on your office door? What would people think? What would they say?")

UPDATE: Lots of action in the comments on this one. Tonya writes: "I quite like the photo and resist the idea that the right owns the flag. " Somebody else writes: "[A]s long as displaying the flag is considered right wing, the left is not going to win nearly as many elections as they'd like." I'd say, the photo above reads as right wing. The left may love the flag too, though, but not in such a stark display. Here's my most left-wing flag photo, from the Kerry rally here in Madison last fall:

Something has gone seriously awry.... with our Birkenstocks.

They've brought in Heidi Klum. And this is the result.





Heidi seems to belong to the Tana School of Fashion Design.

UPDATE: That first shoe -- that "lace-up half boot with striking animal motifs" -- costs $600!

"It was a physical and psychological nightmare."

It's hard, playing The Thing. Take a look at the thick glued-on costume that freaked out Michael Chiklis:

Dr. Nancy Subel, the Los Angeles clinical psychologist with whom Mr. Chiklis spoke at least three times, told him to ground himself in the reality around him and to resist giving in to anxiety, lest it snowball. "She had me describe to myself everything in my dressing room and reminded me that actors often live in the moment, no matter how difficult that moment can be," he said. "Then she told me to get out of the makeup chair and walk around," advice he followed - even though his costume's shoes weighed 13 pounds each.

Quick summary of the current state of the O'Connor replacement rhetoric.

Okay, it didn't take long, looking at news articles and listening to Sunday TV newstalk to see the theme each party has got going on the O'Connor replacement.

DEMOCRATS: O'Connor was a moderate and ought to be replaced by a moderate. We Democrats can't say more than that until we see who the nominee is, at which point we will need plenty of time to do our research. (And you should get the point that this will take forever and include a filibuster if Bush doesn't get the message and choose a moderate.)

REPUBLICANS: Bush will do an exquisitely careful, thoughtful job in choosing a nominee, who, being so carefully, thoughtfully chosen, will deserve the utmost respect, which must be expressed in the form of a quick "up-or-down vote."

Tempted to tune out until we actually hear who the nominee is? Or do we have to worry that the terms of the fight are being importantly "framed" right now? If so, I feel compelled to get into the act, because the blogosphere has got to make a show for itself too.

So let me say four things.

1. I agree that O'Connor was a moderate, within the spectrum of opinion that currently reigns in constitutional interpretation -- reigns in the courts, I hasten to say, not in the academy, of course.

2. It's a contestable point whether a Justice ought to be replaced by someone as much like her (or him) as possible. I think we should notice and fight over whether a different sort of Justice is filling a vacancy, but there's no general principle here. Past Presidents have often taken advantage of vacancies to shift the Court. The President has the power of appointment under the Constitution, and the President has reached his position of power through a democratic process that today very much includes debate about the direction the Supreme Court should take. The real question is whether this Court, now, should be shifted, not whether it is legitimate in the abstract to shift the Court.

3. I don't think the failure to choose a moderate can, in itself, be portrayed as the sort of "extraordinary circumstances" that justify a filibuster under the terms of the recent filibuster compromise. Still, filling a Supreme Court vacancy is very different from putting someone on the Court of Appeals, so it's not enough to say the new nominee is no more conservative than the nominees who were confirmed after the compromise. We need to concern ourselves about the Supreme Court's power to overturn precedents, so what was not "extraordinary" at the appellate court level can become "extraordinary" at the Supreme Court level. But it would be unfair to simply assert that the circumstance of appointing a Supreme Court Justices is in itself "extraordinary."

4. The mere fact that Bush is going to "take this responsibility seriously" -- as he put it -- doesn't mean whatever he does warrants supine deference. If the Republicans chant "up-or-down vote" too much, it's going to feel really oppressive. (I'm already sick of that phrase.) There are a lot of people who worry that they are going to lose rights they believe they are entitled too. Getting all overbearing in response to this genuine fear is going to turn moderates like me against you. And I'm not one of those people insisting on a moderate.

Disconnected from the locality, tuned in to the galaxy.

Yesterday, I stopped at Borders for a quick browse and a whatever-Borders-calls-their-Frappucino. The barista, making small talk, said, "So are you on your way to Rhythm and Booms?"

I said, "Oh, is that today?" and she gave me the full gape-mouthed are-you-the-stupidest-person-in-the-world look.

The "Rhythm and Booms" fireworks display (accompanied by radio music) is quite popular around here. Last night, the crowd in attendance was larger than the population of Madison. I do realize that Monday is the Fourth of July. Presumably, the fireworks display occurs on or near that day. And here I had been listening to the radio all day on my long drive to the Natural Bridge State Park. But, of course, I didn't hear any announcements and promotions of local events. I was connected to the satellite radio -- off in space. In fact, I was tuned to the ethereal "Visions" channel, which makes driving through landscapes feel like a spiritual journey:

With its blend of soothing, inviting , magical music and inspiring and meditative messages, AudioVisions creates a place you can escape to when the world seems all too real. The music flows with an inviting pulsation and once you've accepted the invitation you'll find yourself surrounded by the joys of nature, inspired by poetry and messages of peace, and thrilled by all things beautiful.

I especially enjoyed William Orbit as I made my little local orbit to climb to a hilltop and back. They played "Adagio for Strings." I wonder what music they played on the regular radio at "Rhythm and Booms"?

Goodbye to Governor Nelson.

Gaylord Nelson, the former governor of Wisconsin, founder of Earth Day, has died.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked a panel of historians and other experts to name the century's 10 most significant people in Wisconsin. Nelson ranked fourth, behind Robert M. (Fighting Bob) La Follette, naturalist, philosopher and author Aldo Leopold, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Religion and mental illness.

The NYT has a long piece on the mentally ill Romanian nun who was killed in a botched attempt at exorcism.

"You can't take the Devil out of people with pills," the 29-year-old priest, Daniel Petre Corogeanu, told a Romanian television station during a four-hour interview taped just before he and the nuns were arrested in June.

Isn't that disturbingly similar to Tom Cruise on the "Today Show"?

All it does is mask the problem, Matt. And if you understand the history of it, it masks the problem. That's what it does. That's all it does. You're not getting to the reason why. There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance.

Sex hoax of the week.

I think it's a hoax. The Metafilterers hoax-detection skills are on full display at the link.

When librarians break loose.

The UW-Madison Book Cart Drill Team.

Beautiful.

~~~

Originally uploaded by John Cohen.

John blogs a cup of coffee. In Paris.

UPDATE: What am I saying? John Flickr's a cup of coffee, which I then proceed to blog. I've got the whole "coffee blogging" meme on the brain, because the local Madison bloggers keep talking about coffee blogging. It's the thing around here. Not in Paris.

ANOTHER UPDATE: See the comments. Tonya wants recognition for her early, seminal critique of coffee-blogging.

Let's not stay here.

This is, apparently, a hotel. In Paris.

Drawing a face.

We had dinner at Macaroni Grill again, and both of us picked up the crayons and drew furiously on the butcher paper as we waited for the food. Despite the lack of blue or purple (or black) crayons, I tried a quick portrait of Chris. Then, the first food came and the soup had a face drawn on it:



Dig in, Chris:

In the ancient hills.

Today, I drove up to Natural Bridge State Park, up in the ancient, ancient Baraboo Hills:



If you need a mental picture of Wisconsin. That is the picture.

I walked up to see the thing that made them make this a state park:



Years ago, they excavated this area at the base of the bridge and found evidence that human beings found shelter here 12,000 years ago:



People carved off a slice of mastodon to gnaw, right here, once, long ago.

Slide show.

Still wondering about the Piano Man?

You know: the man who found wearing a soaking wet suit in Sheerness, Kent, in April, and who soon thereafter drew a picture of a piano and, when brought to a piano, sat down and played a 4-hour virtuoso performance. Here's a new update. They are investigating 200 names they think might be his, and he seems to be "more responsive" when spoken to in Norwegian. Ah, poor Piano Man! Our heart goes out to you.

Crushing "liberal dreams" of "some heightened feminine compassion."

Dahlia Lithwick has this piece delving into the "mystery" of Justice O'Connor. People expected a female to bring extra "heart," "compassion," and "empathy" -- Litwick uses all three words -- to the Court:

Suffice it to say, Justice O'Connor is a huge mystery to most women of my generation. How could someone who blew open doors for generations of women after her show so little empathy to female victims of violence in the 2000 case of United States v. Morrison, for instance, where she joined with the court's conservatives to invalidate the Violence Against Women Act, or to teenagers facing the death penalty in Roper v. Simmons last fall?

On that last question, let me offer this passage from O'Connor's dissenting opinion:

Christopher Simmons’ murder of Shirley Crook was premeditated, wanton, and cruel in the extreme. Well before he committed this crime, Simmons declared that he wanted to kill someone. On several occasions, he discussed with two friends (ages 15 and 16) his plan to burglarize a house and to murder the victim by tying the victim up and pushing him from a bridge. Simmons said they could "'get away with it'" because they were minors. In accord with this plan, Simmons and his 15-year-old accomplice broke into Mrs. Crook’s home in the middle of the night, forced her from her bed, bound her, and drove her to a state park. There, they walked her to a railroad trestle spanning a river, “hog-tied” her with electrical cable, bound her face completely with duct tape, and pushed her, still alive, from the trestle. She drowned in the water below. One can scarcely imagine the terror that this woman must have suffered throughout the ordeal leading to her death.

I read plenty of empathy there. Simmons was 17 when he did these things, and the jury that condemned him to death was allowed to take his youth into account as one of the factors. It just wasn't enough in his case. [ADDED: And shouldn't this count as "empathy to female victims of violence," even though it's not in the official "Violence Against Women" case?]

But why are we demanding extra empathy from women in the first place? Is this supposed to be a feminist critique of O'Connor? I have a feminist critique for anyone who wants to see a special women's version of the law. Lithwick grudgingly and mushily offers some good words for O'Connor in the end -- even as she identifies Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the better woman. But Lithwick's overall message is clear:

Women are supposed to be liberals.

"FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD."

The man who penned the ultimate tabloid headline, William J. Brink, has ... well ... dropped dead.

Set in huge bold letters, the headline screamed across Page 1 of the paper on Oct. 30, 1975. In six taut syllables, it brought home its message with the power of a knockout punch: At the height of New York's fiscal crisis, President Gerald R. Ford had declined to bail the city out.

Those six syllables, as Mr. Ford later acknowledged, almost certainly lost him New York State in his 1976 race against Jimmy Carter, and with it, the presidency.

Powerful. The pen is mighty.

The NYT, which had to resist saying Brink "dropped dead," does poke fun at itself:

The corresponding headline in The New York Times that day, FORD, CASTIGATING CITY, ASSERTS HE'D VETO FUND GUARANTEE; OFFERS BANKRUPTCY BILL, remains unsung.

Speaking of picking a new Supreme Court Justice...

Why not switch to a system of electing them? There's a new book proposing exactly that, and I have a review of it in -- of all places -- The New York Times.

Thanks and goodbye, Justice O'Connor.

I feel a little guilty about jumping into all the speculation about who's going to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court without going through a stage of respectful celebration of the grand judge.

Was that wrong? Is it like reacting to news of your husband's death by talking about your dating prospects? Or is it a healthy focus on the future? Or is it just exactly the response the Justices themselves have earned by holding their seats so long and not giving us the new-Justice experience often enough?

But do I feel like celebrating judges? I have spent my entire professional career trying to understand the writings of Justice O'Connor, who became a Supreme Court Justice in 1981, the year I graduated from law school. I remember having a conversation with my father about President Reagan's promise to appoint the first woman to the Supreme Court. Even though I hadn't been a Reagan supporter, I believed the promise. My father, who seemed to think it was his job to teach me to be cynical, assured me Reagan was going to appoint William Bradford Reynolds. I was glad to have a woman Justice at last -- and simultaneously, to beat my father (and his cynicism) in an argument.

When I started teaching law school, the first case I spent a lot of time thinking about, as I developed an interest in federalism, was the 1983 case of Michigan v. Long, for which O'Connor wrote the majority opinion. (Long is a case that presages Bush v. Gore: despite the dissenting Justice's pleas for federalism-based deference to state courts, the Court finds reason to review and reverse.) I have spent many, many hours poring over O'Connor opinions: she was the key voice in the Court's writing about federalism in the early 90s, before federalism became a more central concern for the Court.

Three cases that were important in the development of the Supreme Court's federalism and written by O'Connor were in New York v. United States (1992), Gregory v. Ashcroft (1991), and Coleman v. Thompson (1991). Coleman begins with the line: "This is a case about federalism." (It should be noted that Gregory, the oldest of this trio of cases, cites and relies on the ideas in Michael McConnell's brilliant article Federalism: Evaluating the Founders' Design, 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1484 (1987), just one of the many reasons McConnell belongs in the seat O'Connor is vacating.)

But I've spent too much of my life puzzling over O'Connor opinions to go into celebration mode. I like all the Supreme Court Justices well enough. I have defended each one of them in turn when I've heard them scoffed at or criticized too sharply. They have a hard job, and they do it diligently for the most part. But they must love their work, for whatever reasons, to keep at it as long as they do. They are human beings, and we need to rely on human beings to do the work of government. The Justices, like all human beings, have their weaknesses, and I assume one reason they hold their jobs as long as they do is that they enjoy the power and the prestige. Instinctively, I resist heroizing people who have that much power. We need to watch the powerful closely to see if they abuse their power. It's just not in me to love and admire these people. My thoughts about a retiring Justice are about the work that he or she did. I've been reading and writing and talking about this person's writings for years, and now the final case has been written. The oeuvre of Sandra Day O'Connor is complete.

I was struck by this article in Reason, interviewing various people about who their "favorite Justice" is. (Those who clerked for a Supreme Court Justice and picked "their" Justice -- well, isn't that like having your favorite song be the song that was playing the first time you had sex? It's just not information for me about whether it was a good song. But how nice for you.) Reading the Reason article, I realized that it doesn't come naturally to me at all to think in terms of a "favorite Justice." I'd be hard pressed to tell you who appeals to me the most in the current group or in the larger historical group. There isn't enough direct expression of an individual in a Supreme Court opinion to reach out to me and win favor for the person. And there really shouldn't be. The opinions represent groups and are written to interpret and accord with texts. One can discern a certain style of reasoning in each of the Justices, certain sympathies and weaknesses, and these things are helpful in understanding the cases, but in the end Supreme Court Justices are pretty gray characters.

Still, Sandra Day O'Connor was one of the most colorful. I loved reading the very colorful story of her life growing up on a cattle ranch. I'm sure she's a fine person and I appreciate the work she's done for us. So thanks and goodbye, Justice O'Connor.

"What the hell was going on in the 3rd century?"

Do you ever go to a bar alone... and read? And if you do, do you read books that you'd feel weird about showing to a stranger who asks what you're reading? And if you do and a stranger does, do you end up having a long conversation about the Gnostic gospels?

Things are going Schwimmeringly for Tonya in London.

And she gets a nice closeup photo of his fleshy face, part obscured by a camouflage hat. (What is that gray and black camouflage for? A polar shoreline?)

UPDATE: Bad link fixed.

At the TV studio.

I like seeing the inside of a TV studio. Spacious, colorful, full of cables and equipment, with an exuberant, well-lit set at one end:





Take a wild guess what we were talking about.

"Find your own 'Let there be'!"

RLC pictures a school for gods -- "divinity school" -- with the gods-in-training working on the intelligent life assignment.

“They’re flexible, see? They don’t do anything all that well, they’re not committed to any one thing, so they can do anything. It suddenly occurred to me -- don’t think about where they come from, think about where they’re going. Give them less to start with, and they’ll have to hurry up and do more. And don’t make them all that intelligent, either -- that costs too much. Just smart enough to survive and spread. I think I can save quite a lot on the budget with this one, Sir, and plow it back into things like -- oh, I don’t know. Hubris."

Maybe this could be a TV show to replace "Joan of Arcadia."

Defining "midlife crisis."

We're having a little debate here about the meaning of "midlife crisis." Here's the Wikipedia definition to get you started:

A mid-life crisis is an emotional state of doubt and anxiety in which a person becomes uncomfortable with the realization that life is halfway over. It commonly involves reflection on what the individual has done with his life up to that point, often with feelings that not enough was accomplished. The individual may feel boredom with their lives, jobs, or their partners, and may feel a strong desire to make changes in these areas. The condition is also called the beginning individuation, a process of self-actualization that continues on to death. The condition is most common in people in their 30s and 40s, and affects men more often than women.

Clearly, that definition needs some tweaking, but what do you think? Is this a useful term to an individual reflecting on his or her own life? Do you feel better or worse or different about your situation if someone characterizes it as a "midlife crisis"?

Here's something I wrote in the course of this little local debate I'm referring to:

I think the MLC is when you are married and living complacently and then you start taking risks violating conventions because you don't want to be that kind of person anymore. Once you're out of the marriage, the crisis is over. You're just adapting to new conditions in a normal way. Having problems and bad feelings is normal life, not a crisis.

What do you think?

UPDATE: Terry Teachout takes "midlife crisis" to have a broader and more serious meaning than I do, which will please at least one participant in the local debate I've alluded to. I take the feeling he describes seriously, but I still don't like the term "mid-life crisis" for it. The term has an unserious tone to my ear, like the old "identity crisis." Teachout's concern is confronting the reality of death, however, and the person I have been debating with locally is chafing at the inadequacies and boredom of ordinary life. My local interlocutor wants to break out and change all sorts of things (but is not doing anything very unsual), and Teachout is talking about coming to terms with a reality that he has zero potential to change. The similarity is a feeling of wanting to live -- in some fuller way than seems currently available.

Where O'Connor was the fifth vote.

Marty Lederman is compiling a list of important cases. Key issues in play: affirmative action, regulations limiting abortion (not the abortion right itself), Establishment Clause.

A little TV.

If you're in Madison: I'm going to be on "Live at 5" today, talking about the O'Connor retirement.

If Bush picks a very strong conservative to replace O'Connor, I predict...

... that Justice Kennedy will become a reliable liberal vote. This prediction is based on my belief that there is small group dynamic at work on the Court that tends to produce moderation.

This prediction was inspired by Orin Kerr's observation:

O'Connor's retirement may shift the Court a lot less than people think. In the big ideological cases of the last Term, Justice Kennedy was the swing vote as often as (or maybe even more often than) Justice O'Connor. Let's assume for now that O'Connor is replaced by a consistently more conservative Justice; even if that's true, the left-of-center Justices presumably still have 4 very reliable votes and a good shot at picking up a 5th vote with Kennedy. Plus, new Justices are hard to predict, and it's often hard to tell whether a new Justice will vote consistently one way or another.

What does the O'Connor retirement suggest about a possible Rehnquist retirement?

Orin Kerr has a bunch of questions on the occasion of the O'Connor announcement. Here are the related questions #3 and #4:

3. The big question now is whether the Chief will announce soon as well. I'm not sure whether SOC's retirement makes the Chief's more or less likely — any thoughts?

4. Interesting that after years of SOC retirement rumors, she retires after a Term in which most people were looking to another Justice to retire.

I think we should still expect the Chief Justice to retire and see the retirement of O'Connor as a sign that the retirement is more likely. I know in the past Justices have waited a year to let the attention be given to another retiring Justice -- at least that was the case when Justice Blackmun retired one year after Justice White. But that was back at a time when there were a lot of retirements in succession. I think that now, with all these long years without a vacancy, processing two nominees together would help the transition.

The political arena is going to go absolutely wild even over one new Justice, and it seems to me that having two to confirm at once would be a way to control and manage the emergent hysteria. There would be more leeway in political negotiations with two vacancies, and less attention to the very specific interest in replacing the first woman with another woman. And we could have one crazy summer instead of two. Whether easing the political battle is a factor the Chief would or should take into account is another matter.

From William Rehnquist's personal perspective -- not that it's for me to say -- it would seem that he's lived with and accommodated himself to a familiar group for so long, that it would be difficult, especially for an older, ailing person, to deal with a newcomer. Perhaps not. Perhaps it would be energizing to welcome a new colleague, a fresh, young ally. Frankly, if I were old and ailing, I might want to stay in the thick of stimulating, new experiences.

"So this is almost as if God has spoken. It's an elementary discussion now. They have made the decision."

So said Nancy Pelosi about the Supreme Court's decision in Kelo, and everyone's been exclaiming over her statement ever since. Yes, of course, it was an incredibly dumb way to express respect for the Supreme Court's role in saying what the Constitution means.

But, for one thing, Congress can change the outcome in a case that limits constitutional rights by creating statutory rights (assuming it has an enumerated power to rely on and doesn't violate any affirmative constitutional restrictions).

And, for another thing, God doesn't submit a resignation letter.

So now the author of the principal dissent in Kelo has resigned. But the chances are slim that the new appointee will vote on the other side. I expect to hear Kelo mentioned a lot in the debate over the new nominee.

O'Connor resigns!

Thrilling excitement is unleashed!

Here's the text of the resignation:

"This is to inform you of my decision to retire from my position as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, effective upon the nomination and confirmation of my successor. It has been a great privilege indeed to have served as a member of the court for 24 terms. I will leave it with enormous respect for the integrity of the court and its role under our constitutional structure."

This is so much more significant than Chief Justice Rehnquist retiring, because replacing her vote will dramatically change the power balance on the Court.

I am all atremble!

If you're legally required to do half of the housework, who defines what the whole is?

There's a new Spanish law requiring men to do half of the housework. (Via Memeorandum.) And yes, it's ridiculously intrusive, weirdly unenforceable, and unfairly blind to whether the man works more outside the house, but what really bugs me is that requiring half assumes you know what the whole is.

While Spain's women daily perform at least six hours of housework, men clock up only 44 minutes - plus 51 minutes of childcare to their spouses' daily average of six hours.

What?! Do American couples spend 88 minutes a day on nonchildcare housework? Spanish men are supposed to do half with the whole determined by the bizarre six hours that the women spend? I say the women should just cut back to 44 minutes, leave the men alone, and reach equality by a far, far happier method.

More than 12,000 Bangladeshi children are needlessly blind.

Here are some nice pictures of ones who have had their sight restored.

A more profound manifestation of the Parisian.

~~~
Originally uploaded by John Cohen.

I like the way John captured multiple crosses in this image.

(Click to enlarge.)

Ne pas toucher!

~~~
Originally uploaded by John Cohen.

I love this picture from Paris, where my son John is participating in the Cornell Law School summer program.

What passage in Revelation did Marlon Brando circle?

This one:

"The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble . . ."

That's Revelation 18:12. We know this because his personal effects were put up for auction, including his Bible. Here's the report in the WaPo, written by Robyn Givhan, who scoffs that "pop psychologists, street-corner ministers, literary deconstructionists" can now "have at" the marked-up Bible.

In case you want to interpret the mind of Brando, based on that circled passage, here it is in context, which is that all the riches in the city of Babylon are burning:

15 The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing, 16 And saying, Alas, alas, that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls! 17 For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off, 18 And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city!

Forget the mind of Brando for a moment, what about the mind of the person who, setting up this exhibit, decided to display the Bible opened to that page? I'm thinking that person meant to criticize the people who had become merchants of these things -- and the people who came to gawk at them.

"It's the most un-American thing that can be done."

That's from Representative Maxine Waters -- about eminent domain. She's speaking on the subject as Congress considers ways to put a clamp on local government power -- recognized by the Supreme Court -- to take private property to use for economic development. The linked article, in the Washington Times, repeatedly calls this a "new" power and states the holding of the case laughably badly:

Last week's Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London created new eminent domain powers to allow local governments to take private property from its lawful owner and give it to a private developer who promises to generate greater tax revenue with the land.

The new powers of eminent domain -- long reserved for taking property only for public use such as highways -- could be used to build developments such as privately owned strip malls or motels.

I guess we have the actual case and the myth of the case. Congressional rhetoric predictably uses the mythic version. Tom DeLay spouts:

"The Supreme Court voted last week to undo private property rights and to empower governments to kick people out of their homes and give them to someone else because they feel like it," said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Texas Republican. "No court that denies property rights will long respect and recognize other basic human rights.

Could people try to remember what the Court actually did in the Kelo case? It rejected a bright-line rule that would have said economic development never counts as part of the public use for which property can be taken. Horrible exercises of eminent domain of the sort DeLay refers to here were left to be decided in particular cases when they actually arise. Justice Stevens wrote:

It is ... argued that without a bright-line rule nothing would stop a city from transferring citizen A’s property to citizen B for the sole reason that citizen B will put the property to a more productive use and thus pay more taxes. Such a one-to-one transfer of property, executed outside the confines of an integrated development plan, is not presented in this case. While such an unusual exercise of government power would certainly raise a suspicion that a private purpose was afoot, the hypothetical cases posited by petitioners can be confronted if and when they arise. They do not warrant the crafting of an artificial restriction on the concept of public use

If Congress is so outraged about the abuse of power, why isn't it outraged by its own behavior when it wields the great legislative power of the federal government without bothering even to try to accurately describe the problem it means to address?

UPDATE: Here's the WaPo report on the bill the House passed:

The House measure, which passed 231 to 189, would deny federal funds to any city or state project that used eminent domain to force people to sell their property to make way for a profit-making project such as a hotel or mall....

The measure, an amendment to an appropriations bill, would apply to funds administered by the departments of Transportation, Treasury, and Housing and Urban Development. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said they will push for a more inclusive measure that would apply to all federal funds.

A fact sheet said under the bill the locality or state would "lose any federal funds that would contribute in any way to the project the property would be taken for."

No, no hypocrisy here is there? Did they pause anywhere in all of this and ask whether they had the power to do this? How is this not a flagrant violation of Congress's spending power? Why not condition all federal spending on state concession of whatever autonomy the states happen to have left?!

"We only talked about it because we were offered this gig where we were on after the guy who fights the shark."

The time the Beatles considered getting back together.